


three seconds in, three seconds out

by gohoubi



Category: Snowpiercer (TV 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Flashbacks, Gen, Heavy Angst, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:55:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25124278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gohoubi/pseuds/gohoubi
Summary: Melanie Cavill is unable to sleep one night on Snowpiercer, but she does not expect her fellow engineer Javi to join her. Both of them struggle with the choices they’ve made and how to keep on going.
Relationships: Melanie Cavill & Javier "Javi" de La Torre
Comments: 8
Kudos: 26





	three seconds in, three seconds out

**Author's Note:**

> This fic went through about 6 rewrites. I love this show, I love Melanie and I love writing about her. However, it was very difficult to actually decide who this fic should be about. Melanie has so many interesting interactions with many different characters but I really only wanted to pick one. I started this fic a week ago, and Javi was not who I expected to write about. I still think he's very interesting. What's his history? What exactly sparked all his resentment towards the other engineers? He's kept deliberately under wraps, I'm sure. Hopefully the next episodes talk about him a bit more!
> 
> Probably obvious, but this fic is completely pre-canon.

_Allie!_

Melanie Cavill jerked awake, breath catching in her throat and tears already drying on her face. The train shook and wobbled underneath her, swaying regularly. Mel held her breath, waiting for one of the other engineers to notice her distress. Her pulse quickened as Javi shifted in his bunk above her. He sighed and went back to sleep. _Good thing he’s a heavy sleeper._ The train could have derailed and Mel doubted he’d wake up.

Mel turned her head to the narrow window, looked outside at the dark, cold landscape. In the far distance, she could see the spires of the Willis Tower, dead and powerless. Chicago already. She vaguely remembered visiting there, going up the tower to the tallest observation deck. Seeing the city spread out in front of her. Now everything was gone. Frozen buildings, frozen streets, frozen cars, frozen people. Everything surrendered to the ice. Except for Snowpiercer. Mel looked away from it after a while, unable to repress the wave of despair rising up.

Mel stifled a sob. She knew if she started crying she’d never stop. Crying was not uncommon in the engineers’ cabin - more than once she’d seen Javi weeping over the framed photo of his grandmother. During these times, she and Bennett made themselves scarce and pretended not to notice. A Snowpiercer rule. Leave people to their emotions. Mel was not that person, however. She didn’t want to lose control in front of them.

Mel closed her eyes again, saw the face of her daughter. Opened them. She knew chasing sleep would be futile. Outside the window the view had changed. Mel was grateful for that. Now it just looked like hills. Landscape that didn’t make her heart ache.

The timepiece on the wall said **0145**. She could go relieve Bennett of his train-driving duties early. Sleep wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Mel could already imagine what he might say. _Mr Wilford wants the train all to herself, eh?_ She’d playfully swat at his arm. Bennett’d leave out the back door, holding the chipped Wilford mug he always used.

Mel decided she’d go. She rolled off the bunk in one fluid motion. Pulled on the MIT hoodie. Filled a cup with water, palmed the door access pad. The door slid quietly open. Mel turned back for a second, made sure Javi didn’t wake. She did this every time, but Mel had yet to wake him up.

The double doors to the main engine room parted, revealing the barrel-like engine room. Lights on switches around the room flashed irregularly, some bright, some dim. In every colour of the rainbow. Once Mel thought them beautiful, but now she found them ominous. So much was controlled by one tiny plastic switch. _Heat - First Class. Lights - First Class. Water Reclamation._ And so on.

Bennett was reclined in the chair at the control desk, feet up on the dashboard. Reading a book, dog-eared and oft-read. Relaxing. Unaware. “Bennett,” Mel said, breaking the silence as she moved to be level with the chair. He put his feet down, swivelled in his chair to look at her. “Well, well, well. Coming to relieve me of my train duties yet again?”

Mel smiled, partly in relief. She wouldn’t have to explain. “You know me too well.”

Bennett stood, the chair creaking in protest. “Who am I to refuse Mr Wilford herself?” Mel took the chair. “Don’t work too hard,” Bennett said as he left.

“I won’t,” Mel said to his retreating back. The doors at the end of the corridor opened, then closed again. She felt herself relax - this was where she belonged, where she could feel safe. If you could feel safe on a train barrelling through an icy tundra.

The train jolted slightly. Mel looked outside to see where they were. A field with a barbed wire fence around it. Shadowy mounds, covered in snow and ice. A burial ground.

* * *

_“Please, we have to wait for them,” Mel begs, watching the seething mass of people on the platform. If it could even be called that._

_The guard grabs her shoulder, forces her to look at him. “The ice is coming. We can’t stay much longer. I know they’re out there, but - “_

_“Please!” Mel’s vision blurs with tears, and the bitter cold. She can see nothing out there, just the squirming, desperate crowd of people trying to get on the train. Trying to save themselves. Mel takes a shaky breath, the freezing air burning her lungs as she inhales._

_“All ticketed passengers present and accounted for,” comes the voice of another guard next to them. “Doors sealed and ready to go.”_

_Mel feels her heart sink. Of course her family wasn’t ticketed, because who needed tickets when you were related to the head engineer? “Please, it’s my daughter, my parents, I can’t leave them out there.”_

_The guard - his name tag labelled Jesse - bites his lip violently, clearly unsure of what to do. He has orders, but he’s getting uncertain with Mel’s pleading right in front of him. The sound of gunshots popping comes from outside. Guards beating back the masses. “Miss Cavill, I have orders. Once all ticketed passengers are accounted for, we can leave.”_

_Mel curses her lack of foresight. “I’m the head engineer. I give you orders. Fuck the orders! You will wait!” She grips his flak jacket, shakes him slightly. “Please, wait.”_

_Jesse sighs. “Alright, just a few - “_

_“Jesse!” interrupts the other guard, pointing at the door. The ice is beginning to encroach into the train car, crystallising up the door frame. Spreading its cold blue fingers across the floor. Mel knows what it means. She looks at the floor, then at Jesse. He makes eye contact, a silent apology._

_“Wait,” says Mel, reaching for his arm. “No, no, no - “_

_Jesse slams the door access panel. The last open door on Snowpiercer closes, hissing loudly. Drowning out the screams of the doomed people outside. A light turns green above the door. A buzzer sounds._

_The wheels begin to turn, and the train begins to move._

_Mel dives for the door, scrabbling at the edges, crying out in pain at the burning cold. She doesn’t stop, not when the ice starts to form on her fingertips, not when Jesse grabs her around the midriff with both arms and tears her away from the door. She fights against him with preternatural strength, scratching his face, struggling against his arms, anything to get back to the door._

_“Let me go!” Mel screeches, her whole body shaking with the exertion. “Let me go, let me go, I need to get back to them! I need them, I need them, let me go!”_

_“I can’t do that, Miss Cavill!” yells Jesse over the noise. Mel growls in response, dragging her nails through the soft skin on his hands. Tearing red bloody gouges six centimetres long. Still he does not let go of her._

_A face comes into her field of vision, one with glasses and frizzy hair. Javier, another engineer, who she’d met only a few months ago. Mel will later find out that he’d lost a grandmother - his only family - in the Freeze, but she couldn’t think about him now. The feeling of_ need _overwhelms her mind, firing along every synapse and reducing her vision to one thing: the door to outside._

_“Melanie!” Javier grabs her face in his hands. “Melanie, they’re gone! They’re gone, you can’t save them! Come on, Melanie, you have to leave here. It’s not safe.”_

_“No, they’re still out there! We need to go back, we need to get them…” Mel wants to say more, but the adrenaline is running out. She stops fighting so hard, slumped against Jesse’s flak jacket. “We can’t leave them,” she sobs._

__You just did, _says an insidious little voice at the back of her mind._

 _Finally, the enormity of the past five minutes hits her. Mel will remember later the time she went swimming in the ocean, buffeted by waves taller than her._ You left them. _A wave._ They’re gone. _Another._ They’re frozen. _Another._ You left them. _Another._

__

__

_Mel only realises she is screaming when her throat begins to burn. Javier’s face, shining with tears, swims in and out of focus. He heaves her over his shoulder fireman-style. Stands, begins to retreat. Mel has no strength to fight anymore, no energy to get away from him._

__

_The last thing Mel sees before she blacks out is the door to outside, getting smaller, disappearing, out of her reach._

* * *

Mel came back to reality all at once. Breathing erratically, heart pounding, sweat forming in her palms. _That was seven years ago. Eighteen point nine revolutions ago._ Blessedly, the train had moved past Chicago and all the bad memories associated with it. She wouldn’t see it again for another half year.

Mel curled up on the seat, forced herself to regain control. She did not close her eyes. Doing so would be inviting the memories back. _Breathe. In and out. Three seconds in, three seconds out._ Who had said that to her? Just another one of the strange disconnected phrases that existed in her mind now.

These memories came back to her at all the worst times. She was naive to think it was only Chicago that did it. Seeing a child in the school car. Watching Robert Folger take his daughter’s hand as they went home. All of that reminded Mel of what she lost and could never get back. The only people who knew were Bennett and Javi. She couldn’t trust the others on the train. Couldn’t trust them not to tell, or use it against her somehow. Just like the secret of Mr. Wilford, Allie’s memory stayed confined to the engine room. Even then, Mel didn’t talk about her much. To talk about Allie was to wade into a mire too deep to ford. Mel was an engineer, not a therapist. She supposed her brain had locked all of that away, for protection. So the memories couldn’t hurt her.

Well, her brain was doing a crap job. If even seeing a random kid in the hallways could bring it back.

The doors to the back of the engine room parted. Mel swung around in the chair to face whoever came in. “Javi, it’s not your shift yet, go back to bed.”

“I know.” He shuffled in, grabbed a second chair and sat down next to her. Javi looked slightly worse for wear - his normally frizzy hair was even frizzier, and his glasses were askew. Instead of the engineer uniform he always wore, he had on a pair of dingy sleeping shorts and a singlet.

“So…why are you here?”

“You’re not the only one who has trouble sleeping, Melanie,” Javi drawled, putting his feet up on the control desk. “And I’m not sticking around to listen to Bennett toss and turn all night.”

Mel sighed. She didn’t want a fight with the other engineer. _We’re all hurting, all the time._ There was no point in rising to his bait. She turned away from him, looked at the track disappearing under the train. Mel supposed Javi could do what he liked, but she resented the intrusion.

“Let me guess. You’re annoyed because I interrupted your ‘alone time’.” Javi made sure to accentuate the last two words with air quotes. “Too bad, I’m not going anywhere.” As if to prove his point, he sunk down a little further in his chair.

Mel didn’t look at him. “I’m not going to fight with you, Javi.”

“Can’t deal with the track talk?” Javi scoffed. “God, that sounds so lame. Even just saying it. Of all the things this stupid train came up with, that expression is the worst.”

Mel allowed herself a snicker at that. “You’d think after seven years they’d have thought of something better.”

“Tailies. Thirdies. Kroney. Sounds like something a high-schooler would come up with. For their English class dystopia paper.”

“Yet here we are.” Mel sighed. “Real existential crisis there.”

Javi chuckled darkly in response, but said nothing. The train swayed slightly as it began crossing a bridge over Lake Michigan.

“Why couldn’t you sleep?” Mel asked. This was a risk, considering how closed off Javi was. True to form, he was silent for a long time.

“Same as you,” came the reply from the darkness. Mel decided not to ask, but Javi told her anyway. “I was…thinking about her. My grandmother.” He took off his glasses, wiped them. Put them back on. “She wouldn’t have done well on this train.”

“I don’t think anyone is ‘doing well’ here.”

“No, I mean it. She loved the sun. Nature. Outdoors. Summer weather. Maybe it was better she never made it onboard. Because this…“ Javi waved an arm at the frozen lake they were passing over. “…this would have killed her. Sounds awful to say, I know.”

“It makes sense,” said Mel. “Sometimes I look out here and wonder if there’s any point. Why we should keep living if the world is so committed to keeping us down.”

“It would be a waste of effort to stop now. And you can’t make that choice for three thousand people.”

“Yeah.” Mel sighed. “They say time heals all wounds.”

Javi leaned back in his chair. In the dim blue twilight of the engine room, Mel could not see his face. “Whoever said that didn’t have to leave their family on a frozen platform to die.”

“Never seemed like it affected you all that much,” Mel said. She regretted it immediately, tensed in wait of Javi’s anger. When he responded, however, he sounded tired. “I dealt with it by prayer. Doesn’t float everyone’s boat, but it helped.” Mel always forgot that Javi had a faith. Maybe it was the fact that he wasn’t open about it, or her incredulity that anyone could believe in a higher power after the Freeze. “Just because I didn’t react so violently as you doesn’t mean I never thought about it again.”

Mel turned to Javi, unreadable in the darkness. “You remember that?”

Javi looked her in the eye and said evenly, “But of course. How could I forget?”

* * *

_Consciousness comes back to Mel gradually, by degrees. Sight: empty corridors, pieces of furniture with plastic wrap still on them. Smell: paint, metal, dirty ice. Touch: Javi’s papery engineer uniform, the heat coming off his body. Her head spins; how long has she been hanging upside down? Her mind sluggishly tries to right itself. The walls of the corridor shift in and out of focus. Mel’s ears ring. Javi sways as he walks, compensating for the train’s movement. She is no longer upside down, over his shoulder, but cradled against his chest. Mel’s head pounds in tandem with her heartbeat. How long was she upside down for? Ten minutes? More than that?_

_Mel tries to speak, but her throat is so raw nothing comes forth. She tries again. “Javi,” she croaks out._

_“We’re nearly at the engine,” Javi says, his voice similarly tired. “Hang in there.”_

_With some difficulty, Javi palms the access panel to the engine room. The doors slide open silently. There is nobody there except for the other engineer, Bennett. He sits next to the control desk, head in his hands, silent. He does not register their presence. Javi puts Mel on the floor. Several sheets of paper litter the control desk. Stuffed into folders and spilling from trays, a veritable snowdrift. Everything smells cold, and new. Mel looks around, sees only the other engineer in the room with them. Javi’s face comes into view, eyes full of concern._ They should be here, _keeps repeating itself in her mind, over and over._

 _“Gonna be sick,” Mel chokes out. Javi finds her a small plastic basin probably used as a desk bin. Printed on the side is the Wilford logo._ How fitting, _Mel thinks before she violently pukes into the basin. Javi says nothing, just holds her hair back. When it’s over, she leans back against the bulkhead, too heartsick to cry. “I left them, Javi,” she says near-silently. Eyes prickling with tears unshed._

_“I know, Melanie.” Javi sits next to her, close but not touching._

_“I promised them.” Mel presses her hands against her face, her fingertips protesting. When she takes her hands away she can see her nails darkening to purple. “I told them it was alright to board later. Allie didn’t want me to go. I told her it was going to be alright, Javi. I looked her in the eye and said - “ Mel chokes on a sob, her voice giving out. But she has to finish, it has to be said. “ - I said, ‘I’ll see you on the train soon’. I said I wasn’t going to leave her behind. I did. I lied, Javi.”_

_“You didn’t lie. There wasn’t anything we could do.” Javi awkwardly puts his arm around her. Before tonight, before this world-ending event, Mel would have moved away. Now she leans fully into him. Even then she knows human comfort will be hard to come by on the train._

_“We could have waited longer. I could have given them actual tickets. I could have brought them aboard with me. Instead of…this.” Mel runs her hands through her hair roughly. It hurts, but she doesn’t notice. “What kind of daughter am I? What kind of mother am I? To just…leave them?”_

_Javi can only shake his head. Even he can’t offer her any comfort._

_Panic rises up, tightening itself around her chest. Unbidden, a vision of her family forms itself in Mel’s mind. Watching the train leave. Succumbing to the cold, or getting shot by the guards. God, what if that was how it really happened? Guards firing indiscriminately, Allie’s body torn apart by bullets! Dying alone, in terror and pain._ I should have been there! __

_Mel’s vision deteriorates at the edges, and for one terrifying moment she truly cannot breathe. “Javi,” she says, weakly tugging at his sleeve._

_“Hey, hey, hey,” Javi says, kneeling in front of her. “Breathe, Melanie.”_

_“I can’t,” Mel whines, trying to look away. Javi grabs her face again, makes her look at him. She notes that his glasses still have ice crystals on the lenses._

_“You can. You have to. Melanie, you have to calm down.”_

_“I should have been there,” Mel slams the back of her head against the wall, eliciting a spike of pain. “I left them to the cold, the guards, I…I don’t deserve to live. I shouldn’t be alive!”_

_“Melanie, they’re gone!” Javi yells, his voice cracking. “You do nothing for them by dying too. You can’t bring them back. We have to look after the train. What happened has happened.” Mel thinks he might start crying too, but he takes a breath, calms himself. “We all lost someone, Melanie. My grandmother. Bennett - ” Javi flings a hand to indicate the other engineer, now crumpled on the floor, “ - his whole family. We can’t dwell on it. We just can’t.” Javi lets go of Mel, folds his arms. “We have three thousand terrified people in this train. We have to pull ourselves together.”_

_Already he was compartmentalising this. “I don’t want to keep going,” Mel says plaintively. “I don’t want to.”_

_“Neither do I.” Javi’s eyes soften. “But we’re part of something that’s bigger than ourselves now.”_

_Deep in her heart, Mel knows he is right. Even despite that, she can’t stop the tears when they come. She expects Javi to leave her be, but he gathers her into his arms again. He is warm, and he feels safe. Mel closes her eyes. Surely she can block out the train for a few minutes. This does not help. The panic returns; Mel starts to hyperventilate again. Shakes so violently she wonders how Javi can keep holding on to her._

_“Melanie, breathe. You’re panicking, you have to calm down.”_

__How? _asks the little voice in Mel’s head. “Help me,” is all she can say._

_“Just…” Javi sighs, shifting himself. “Time it by me. Breathe. In and out. Three seconds in, three seconds out.”_

* * *

From the expression on Javi’s face, he was definitely remembering the same thing as Mel. His last words of encouragement died in her ears as she came back to herself.

“We were different people then,” Mel said. “Things changed.”

“No shit,” Javi replied, but not venomously. “We all changed. We had to. Or else we wouldn’t have survived.”

Mel took a chug of her water so she didn’t have to reply. What could she say? “Do we know what happened to Jesse?”

“He died. I looked in the population logs a few years after departure. Cancer.”

Mel leaned back in her chair, looked at the ceiling. “I never thanked you. I’m only now realising. The things you did that night.” Javi stayed silent, but Mel knew he was listening. “Probably would have frozen myself to the door if you weren’t there.” Her voice broke on the last word. Javi either didn’t notice or didn’t acknowledge it. “I’m sorry for freaking out.”

“I get it. Your family was on that platform. You would have done anything to get back to them.”

“Sometimes I have nightmares where they’re still out there. Alive. Stupid, of course. I know they’re gone. But still.”

Javi slammed his fist on the armrest. “It’s the good dreams that do it.”

Mel sat up straighter. “What do you mean?”

“I only ever dream of my grandmother now. Nobody else. I’m in her house in the country. It’s sunny, it’s warm, she’s just made empanadas.” He took a shaky breath. “I come inside from playing. I eat what she’s made while she knits next to the window. Then I wake up here. It’s worse.”

“Because it’s good?”

“Yes!” Javi’s eyes glittered in the twilight. “I feel so…contented for a while. Then I wake up, and realise where I am.” A pause, then: “Do you dream about her? You know, Allie?”

Mel hadn’t heard anyone say her daughter’s name in years. All that time, it was a word she only heard in her mind. Hearing it said by someone else sounded…jarring.

“Yeah. They’re not…” Mel bit her lip, unable to go on. “I don’t deserve to remember her well anyway. Not after what I did.”

Javi put his hand on Mel’s chair, close but not touching her. “Melanie…”

“Don’t try and convince me.” It was Mel’s turn to tear up this time. “Don’t try and tell me that I did everything that I could, or that we all made sacrifices, or - “ She let out a sob. “I don’t care about anyone else. I just…I just want my daughter back.” Mel took a breath, tried to keep her voice steady. “I should have done better. But I failed. And now I’m going to live with that for the rest of my life. Short as it seems to be now.”

Javi’s hand moved to hold her face like he did seven years ago, eighteen point nine revolutions ago. “Melanie. It’s hard.” Unexpectedly, Mel found herself leaning into his touch. “Yeah.”

“You probably don’t want to hear this, but…all we can really do is try to live as best we can, right? So their sacrifices don’t turn out in vain.” Javi stroked his finger along Mel’s face. “Tomorrow will come. It’s another day to live. Another day to try again.”

Mel let out a watery laugh. “Maybe I should make you come up here more often.”

Javi’s mouth quirked up in a smile. “Maybe you should.”


End file.
